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pushing the long standing affair in afghanistan beyond the joke...

Former defence minister and ambassador to the United States Kim Beazley says the Turnbull government should grant a request for more troops to be sent to war-torn Afghanistan.

With a resurgent Taliban and strengthened Islamic State, NATO has asked Australia to contribute to a surge of allied forces in the country, where Australian military personnel are already serving in training, support and security.

On Friday, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said the government was "actively considering" the request, which forms part of a drive by the multilateral military alliance to find a few thousand more troops for the 16-year-old conflict.

Mr Beazley - who also served as deputy prime minister and opposition leader during his time in Parliament and recently vacated his diplomatic posting in Washington DC - said the request was uncontroversial, given Australia's existing commitment of 270 personnel.

In recent history, Afghanistan has been continuously at war for more than 37 years, and we of the West have been fighting for the last 16 in it. Before, we were involved in actually supplying cash and weapons to those we are now fighting, so they could defeat the Ruskies, who reluctantly had got involved in supporting a COMMUNIST government in Kabul, which the Ruskies had not created. This communist government in Kabul came from within Afghanistan, as a solution against TERRORISM of Islamic origin. But we (the Americans and the brilliant West) helped the TERRORIST Taliban (then under a name of Mujahideen) fight the communists who only wanted to modernise and DEMOCRATISE the country and ...

Result: more war and more war and more war... and a country still languishing in difficult conditions with more weapons and more blood being spilled... and more to be spilled...

Last week President Trump delegated to Secretary of Defense James Mattis the authority to determine how many more troops to deploy into Afghanistan. Mattis has reportedly settled on 4,000. He claims that this will help end the stalemate in that war. He is wrong. This deployment will have no impact on the outcome of the 16-year-old war in Afghanistan, but more importantly, continues a troubling trend in U.S. foreign policy: The military move has no ties to a strategic outcome.

Astonishingly, the day before the increase in troop strength was announced by the White House, Mattis admitted in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee that the United States was in a “strategy-free time and we’re scrambling to put it together.” As should be clear by now, the problem isn’t the number of troops, but in the fact the military is being used, without a strategy, to solve a political problem. Until Washington comes to grips with this fundamental error, it is a virtual certainty that the use of force abroad will continue to fail in its attempt to accomplish strategic objectives. Let me explain why.

Throughout my military career, I fought in high-end tank warfare, served in counterinsurgency operations, and performed duty as a foreign-military trainer. I also served on the staffs at the division level, corps level, and in the Pentagon. Since retirement, I have traveled multiple times to the Middle East as a civilian. In short, I have observed or participated in a broad spectrum of combat operations and observed the formation of policy from the lowest to highest levels.

I can say with a high degree of confidence that Washington’s reliance on the military instrument to solve international problems has served to degrade national security.

Everything Americans see or read reinforces that U.S. troops are the most capable, lethal, and powerful in the world; they succeed everywhere they are sent. The unstated assumption, however, is that tactical success equals strategic success. If our troops accomplish their mission, the thinking goes, then the purpose of their mission must also be a success. But that is an incorrect assumption.

SENIOR FELLOW & MILITARY EXPERTAreas of expertise: American foreign policy, Middle East policy, grand strategy, international relations, international security, counterinsurgency

Davis retired from the US Army as a Lt. Col. after 21 years of active service and currently serves as a Defense Fellow and Military Expert for Defense Priorities. He was deployed into combat zones four times in his career, beginning with Operation Desert Storm in 1991, and then to Iraq in 2009 and Afghanistan twice (2005, 2011). He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for Valor at the Battle of 73 Easting in 1991, and awarded a Bronze Star Medal in Afghanistan in 2011.

Davis gained some national notoriety in 2012 when he returned from Afghanistan and published a report detailing how senior U.S. military and civilian leaders told the American public and Congress the war was going well while in reality it was headed to defeat. Events since have confirmed his analysis was correct.

His work on defense, foreign affairs, and social issues has been published in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, CNN, The Guardian (UK), US News & World Report, TIME,Politico, and other publications. Davis was also the recipient of the 2012 Ridenhour Prize for Truth-telling. He is a regular contributor to The National Interest and lives in the Washington, DC, area.